Nancy Kress - After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

“He will be.”

She looked very tired. Pete said awkwardly, “Are you all right? With… everything?”

“I’m fine. I’m just a little old to be doing this.”

Well, you didn’t have to! But Pete didn’t say it. He blundered out and went to the Grab room.

Staring at the inert Grab machinery, which might brighten but probably wouldn’t, Pete thought about his own questions. The air outside was breathable. It wasn’t really good, but it was breathable enough. What was “enough”? There were bushes and grasses and—yes, he remembered now, wrenching the picture into his mind as if yanking up a pair of pants—berries. There had been red berries on some of the bushes. Almost he turned back to tell McAllister, but he didn’t want to face her again.

He had no choice. Somewhere during his Grab duty she came in with Ravi. Immediately Pete wanted to be somewhere else. He got to his feet, scowling to cover his confusion.

Ravi’s mouth was all swollen. His two top front teeth were broken off into jagged stumps. Pete had a moment of panic—how would Ravi eat? Well, he still had all his other teeth…. But his good looks were badly marred. Even without all the puffy swelling, Ravi was never again going to look like the handsome princes in the fairy-tale book.

McAllister said, “Both of you men were at fault in this fight, but—” For a minute Pete didn’t listen, caught by her referring to them as “men.” Had McAllister ever done that before? When he heard her again, it was clear she was blaming him more than Ravi, because “…violence. Not only is it never needed to settle disputes, it damages the good of all and sets a terrible example for the children. Pete, you wouldn’t want Tommy or Petra to someday behave as you did today, would you?”

Pete couldn’t imagine Petra behaving any way at all except smiling or wailing or kicking her fat little legs. Too far in the future. But he saw what McAllister meant, and hung his head.

She was talking to Ravi now. “What you were doing, looking to start a fight with Pete because you were angry with me, is something all humans have to struggle against all the time. Do you understand, Ravi? Winning that struggle with ourselves will be a huge part of what lets us successfully restart humanity. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Ravi said. Pete couldn’t tell if Ravi meant it or not. His voice came out mangled through the swollen mouth.

“You two are brothers,” McAllister said passionately, “and I know that your biological parents, Richard and Emily and Samir, would not have wanted you to act the way you did today. But even more than brothers, you are members of this colony, with a mission that others have already struggled and died for. You must work together no matter what for our survival, or all those other deaths are wasted.”

Ravi said something. McAllister didn’t understand the garbled words; she leaned forward and said, “What?” Ravi shook his head.

But Pete had heard. Ravi had said, “Kill Tesslies.” That was what Ravi thought was their “mission.” And Pete did, too! His head snapped up to look at Ravi, who gazed back. Something passed between them, and all Pete’s animosity vanished. They had a joint mission: revenge. That was more important than who had sex with McAllister, who anyway wasn’t looking very attractive with her belly swollen in pregnancy and all those tired lines around her eyes.

Ravi nodded. They understood each other. McAllister beamed.

“Good,” she said. “Now shake hands.”

They did, and Pete squeezed his brother’s hand. They were on the same side again. They would be killers together.

McAllister said, “I’m so happy.”

Both of them smiled at her.

Along the Euphrates river grew a strip of green: trees, grass, flowers. Away from the river the land turned more arid, dotted with scrub grazed on by sheep and goats. Here, not far from where Babylon had once stood, bacteria mutated on the tap long root of a plant.

Pete and Ravi were now allies. Together they were going to get revenge for Earth. The first Tesslie they saw—and one had to show up eventually, after all Pete had seen one when he’d gone Outside!—they were going to kill.

A week after the fight they sat in the clear-walled room, gazing out at the growing grasses in the black rock. “Those are taller than yesterday,” Ravi said.

“Yeah,” Pete said, although to him the grasses looked exactly the same height. Pete felt obliged to agree with most of what Ravi said because with Ravi’s swollen mouth and broken teeth, Ravi’s words came out a little garbled. On the other hand, he still had his greater height and bigger muscles, which saved Pete from feeling as bad as he would otherwise. The fight had merely evened things up, he felt, the way Darlene “evened up” blankets when she folded them. The same for both sides. Still, Pete sometimes wished that he and Ravi had had the same father, not the same mother. Ravi’s build came from his father Samir, whom Pete could just remember, unlike both of his own parents.

“When we find a Tesslie,” Ravi mumbled—it was always when , not if —“we should have a plan. I’ll grab it from behind and you—”

“Wait a minute,” Pete said. “Is the Tesslie an alien inside a bucket-case or a robot?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes! If it’s a robot, then you hold it and I’ll find the battery case, open it, and pull out the batteries.”

“Good, good,” Ravi said. “If it’s an alien inside a bucket-case, then I’ll hold it tight, you find the place where the bucket-case opens and unbutton or unzip or pry it apart or whatever. Then we can drag the bastard out and hit it with something.”

“With what?” Pete said.

Ravi considered. “We should have a weapon all ready. Hidden, but someplace where we can get at it quick when we need it. I know! Those metal-toed boots from that Grab!”

Pete nodded enthusiastically. The boots were never worn; who wanted all that weight? In the Shell everyone went barefoot. Pete had never seen the point of them. But as a weapon…

Ravi said, “We can kick the Tesslie with those boots and stomp on it until it’s all bloody!”

Pete frowned. The vivid picture created by Ravi’s words didn’t look as appealing as before Ravi described it. Ravi, however, went on and on, spouting things they could do to the Tesslie.

Partly to stop him, partly because the thought had been growing in him for some time, Pete said, “Ravi, I have another idea.”

“What?”

“I think it would help us if we understood more about how Tesslie machinery works. In case, you know, the Tesslies are machinery. We should pick one piece of it and take it apart, examine it real good, then put it back together before McAllister even knows we did it.”

Ravi’s mouth fell open, fully exposing his broken teeth. “Take it apart?”

“Yes. For information about the Tesslies.”

“What if… what if we can’t get the machinery back together again?”

“We’ll be careful, go slow, look at each piece in great detail.” They were words Jenna had used about McAllister’s lesson in taking apart and cleaning McAllister’s precious microscope. Pete wasn’t allowed near the microscope, not since that business with the shit bucket and the broken glass slide.

Ravi said, “Well, if you’re sure…”

“I am,” said Pete, who wasn’t. But all at once the project seemed the most fascinating thing he’d ever done. Find out more about the Tesslies, the better to defeat them! He was like the Little Tailor in the fairy-tale book, using his brain to triumph over evil giants.